“Pull in here,” he said. “I need to pick up a few things.”
CHAPTER 76
DEATH METAL WAS CHUGGING from one of the garage’s four bays when we pulled into Beach City Customs’ parking lot.
Inside, there was a man in coveralls down on one knee, tack welding at the tailgate of a Toyota pickup truck, blue electric sparks crackling in time to the head-banging blast beats. Through the window of the paint room behind him, a guy in a full filter-breathing mask was airbrushing flames onto the gas tank on a large Japanese motorcycle.
Parker and I exchanged a glance when we saw the bike. The shooters who had taken down the LA County cops had escaped on big-bore Japanese motorcycles.
Without any ado, Diaz stuck his head inside the door of the Tacoma and killed the deafening devil tunes.
The welder stood and flipped up his mask, his pudgy brown face scrunched in wonder.
“You kidding me?” he said.
Diaz flipped his badge as he slammed the truck’s door. There was a tire iron on the ground beside the vehicle. It made a musical bing-bong off the concrete as Diaz kicked it across the garage.
“Let me answer your question with a question. Does it look like I’m kidding you? Get Tomás now,” Diaz said.
A broad-shouldered middleweight of a Hispanic man bounced out a door a split second later. He wore a tailored shirt and jacket over expensive jeans and had scar tissue over his eyes and cheekbones like ax cuts on a totem pole.
“Señor Neves, I presume?” Diaz said.
“Yeah? What?” he said with a stunned look on his malevolent face.
Tomás shrugged as we showed our tin.
“And?” he said.
“Señor Neves,” Diaz said with a courtly little bow, “I know you’re a busy man, but do you think it might be possible to speak with you for five minutes about a stolen car? If now’s not good for you, we could always come back later with a search warrant and put you out of business.”
“Why don’t you come back to my office?” Tomás finally said.
“Señor Neves, I thought you’d never ask,” Diaz said.
We followed him up the stairs, into a room with a spotless desk and a phone on it. There was a window in one wall and the cracked door to a bathroom in another.
“OK, here we are. Happy? So what the hell is this about? A stolen car?” Neves demanded.
“Jeez, dog. What is it with you? Could you be ruder?” Diaz cried. “This ain’t the hood. This is Manhattan Beach. You’re supposed to say shit like, Would you like a seat, Officer? Can I get you a cold drink, Officer? I mean, if you want to be a businessman, you should watch an episode of Martha Stewart or something.”
“Fine. Would you like a seat?” Neves said.
“There you go. No seat, man, but do you mind if I use your facilities to freshen up a little?” Diaz said, holding up his palms like a magician about to do a trick.
“Whatever,” Neves said.
“Thanks,” Diaz said, heading into the can. “Cleanliness is next to godliness, you know.”
Diaz wasn’t two steps in when he stopped and turned. Emily and I had to suppress our laughter.
“What the—?” Diaz said loudly.
There was a loud scraping sound, and a moment later, Diaz came out with a stunned look on his face and something dripping in his hand. It was the bar of soap he had wrapped in red cellophane in the parking lot of the CVS. A small package that had a strong resemblance to a kilo of cocaine.
“What have we here, Tomás?” Diaz said, shaking his head in dismay. “Little advice, señor. When you hide something from the cops in a toilet tank, you should really remember to put the lid all the way back on.”
“Whoa,” Tomás said, stunned. He blinked a few times, then shook his lean face vigorously. “This ain’t happening. This is a joke, right? You’re putting me on, yo?”
“Yep,” said Diaz, throwing him up against the wall and ratcheting handcuffs around his wrists. “Wanna hear the punch line? You have the right to remain silent.”
“You planted that shit there! You planted that shit!”
“Yes, I did, Tomás,” Diaz whispered to him. “Want to know a little secret? Planting shit on scum like you is, like, my favorite hobby. Guess what? There ain’t no stolen car, and the gloves are off, bitch. Just got the word from up top, and I couldn’t be happier. CRASH times are here again!”
“You crazy, man. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your buddy Manuel offed an FBI agent, and you think it’s not going to come on you? What did you think was going to happen?”
“But I don’t know any Manuel! What are you talking about? I want my lawyer. Yo, get Terrence! Go next door and get Terrence!” he started yelling.
Through the window, I saw the welder run out of the garage.
“John?” I said.
“It’s OK. I got this,” Diaz said.
Diaz grabbed the gangbanger and kicked out his legs as he body slammed him onto the desk.
“Listen to me, and listen to me good,” he said. “Your lawyer isn’t going to be able to help you when I toss you in MacArthur Park Lake with these cuffs on, maricón. Now start talking.”
Tomás said something in Spanish then. Diaz said something back.
We all jumped when there was a sudden pounding on the door behind us.
CHAPTER 77
EMILY AND I IMMEDIATELY took out our guns.
“What is this? What’s going on in there? Tomás, are you OK? What’s going on in there? Open this door!”
“This is a police interview!” I yelled as I ripped the door open behind my gun. “Put your hands up now!”
I was surprised when I saw that the shocked-looking man standing in the doorway wasn’t a Hispanic gangbanger but a petite Asian guy wearing golf clothes and Clark Kent glasses.
“How dare you point a gun at me! I’m Terrence Che, Mr. Neves’s lawyer. Now, I demand that you tell me what’s going on this instant!”
“They’re framing me, is what’s going on!” Neves yelled. “They’re framing me, Terrence!”
Diaz rolled his eyes. “Shit,” he mumbled as he reluctantly uncuffed Tomás.
“Who are you people? Why are you harassing my client?” Che said as I put my gun away.
“Well, it’s kind of a long story,” Diaz said, handing the lawyer the wet bar of cellophane-wrapped soap as he gently pushed him to the side.
“And wouldn’t you know it? We’re late for a meeting,” Emily said as we exited the room.
“Wait, I’m not done with you. This is illegal,” the feisty, pocket-sized lawyer said, following us down the stairs, into the garage. “You can’t just go around assaulting people. What’s your badge number?”
“Oh, my badge number,” Diaz said, turning and giving him the finger. “LAPD Badge Number One. Got it? Super. Bye, now.”
“Well, that went well,” Emily said as we screeched out of the lot, hopefully before the lawyer could get the plates.
“It did go well, actually,” Diaz said, lazing in the backseat.
“What do you mean? What did Tomás say to you?”
“He said, ‘Please, man. Don’t do this. He’ll kill my family.’ ”
“So Tomás does know something,” Parker said.
Diaz nodded.
“Apparently,” he said.
CHAPTER 78
AFTER WE RETURNED TO HQ and relayed the info about Neves’s connection to Perrine, the reaction up the chain of command was impressive and immediate.
FBI Assistant Director Dressler personally got on the phone to a senior intelligence analyst at none other than the NSA for a full Homeland Security Total Information Awareness workup on the gangbanger.
TIA was an NSA supercomputer-fueled data-mining tool that apparently could de-encrypt and scour each and every data source on the planet to find out about an individual. There were no warrants involved, not even any formal requests to phone or credit card companies that could be turned down. The
NSA hackers just went in wherever they needed to go and took what they wanted.
It was supposed to have been shut down after a hue and cry by the ACLU about privacy, but apparently it wasn’t as shut down as the ACLU thought. Which was fine by me. At least in this instance. Bending and even breaking rules was the least we could do in stopping the utter savagery that Perrine was waging on American citizens.
I admired the heck out of Dressler’s get-her-done attitude. He was even smart enough not to ask us how we came across our info. All he wanted was progress so he could nail Perrine’s ass to the floorboards. Perrine had made a bad mistake when he had killed Agent Mara. The FBI was very, very pissed.
I admired Diaz’s attitude just as much. The Charles Bronson look-alike had certainly stepped up and taken charge of Neves back at the garage. He was a throwback, one of those all-in all-the-time cops who knew the cold, brutal truth that sometimes the solution to a situation comes at the business end of a billy club.
“Tell me something, John,” I said as we put our feet up with a cup of coffee at the back of the command center. “This CRASH-unit scandal thing. You didn’t, perchance, have some personal experience concerning that situation, did you?”
Diaz squinted pensively at his coffee.
“You know, Mike, now that I think about it,” Diaz said with a wink, “perchance I did.”
CHAPTER 79
IT WAS NOON WHEN he left San Francisco and going on three by the time the Tailor saw the first sign for Susanville on 395.
He passed a thin cow, a dilapidated barn, some rusting machinery. The land beyond the open window, the washed-out sand and scrub grass, had a lunar quality to it, the awesome mountains in the distance like something from the cover of a cheap sci-fi paperback. The wind whistled in through the window as the sun glinted off the gold wire of his aviator sunglasses. He drove at a steady five miles over the limit and left the radio off.
The Tailor was average-sized, average-looking, a non-descript bald white man in his early thirties wearing a dark polo shirt and sharply creased stone-colored khakis. He’d been an FBI agent once back east, an army Ranger before that. Now he did things that had bought him a town house in San Fran, a marina apartment in San Diego, and almost a dozen bank accounts stuffed, at his latest tally, with nearly six million dollars in cash.
No one knew his real name. Among those who hired him, he was referred to simply as the Tailor because he dressed nicely and he always sewed everything up.
He got off 395 and passed the Walmart and drove into the town. He cruised past gas stations, beat-up pickup trucks in dirt driveways, some equally beat-up-looking folks on the sidewalks. There was supposed to be a prison, but he didn’t see it. He checked his notes and parked on Main Street, across from a saloon. He dialed the number of the contact the cartel had set up.
“This Joe?” the Tailor said when the line was answered.
“Yep.”
“I’m across the street, the white Chevy Cruze.”
After a minute, a young bearded guy came out. He was broad shouldered and wearing cutoff denim shorts and a Nike T-shirt, the swoosh on it about as faded and washed out as the surrounding prison town. Not even noon, and beer on his breath, the Tailor noted as Joe climbed into the passenger seat.
“Could you put on your seat belt, please?” was the first thing the Tailor said.
“Come again?” Joe Six-Pack said.
“Your seat belt. Could you please put it on?”
The Tailor waited patiently for the contact to secure the belt before pulling out. California was click-it-or-ticket, and getting pulled over was not on the agenda. Not with what he had in the trunk.
“Where we headed?” Joe wanted to know.
“For a spin,” the Tailor said. “Do you know this town?”
“I should. I’ve lived here all my unfortunate life. Can I smoke?”
“No,” the Tailor said. “You work at the school?”
“Sorta. I’m the assistant football coach, and you can save the Sandusky jokes, thank you.”
The Tailor handed him the file with the photos in it.
“You recognize any of these kids? They would have arrived within the last eight or nine months.”
“Nope. Not even a little,” Joe said after flicking through them. “An Asian kid around here? That, I would have remembered.”
The Tailor nodded to himself. They were homeschooling them. Witness Protection 101. The Tailor had expected that.
“Go through the pictures again, Joe, and think again slowly. You might have bumped into them at the Walmart, the local pizza place, on the sidewalk, church?”
“Wait,” Joe said, holding up a finger. He fished through the folder again and took out the photo of the priest.
“This guy ain’t Irish, is he? Has, like, an Irish accent?”
The Tailor was pretty sure he did, but he glanced at his notes anyway.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“My mom told me an Irish priest subbed for the local pastor a couple of weeks back.”
The Tailor felt it then. A primordial tingling down his spine as warmth spread in his belly. He always thought of the sensation as how a shark must feel on detecting the first traces of blood in the water. Fresh meat this way. The happy foreshadowing of victory.
The Bennett contract was a whale, all right. Three million. He knew what he was going to buy with it, too. A flat in Paris. Travel was one of his few passions.
“That right?” the Tailor said as he lawfully put on his clicker and made a perfect K-turn.
Joe nodded, pulling on his beard.
“The old biddies couldn’t get over it. Imagine, that’s what passes for news here in Susanville, USA.”
“Where’s the Catholic church?” the Tailor asked.
“Where’s my money?” Joe said.
“In the glove box.”
Joe took it out and gazed on it, smiling. The Great Recession really must be hurting these hicks out here, the Tailor thought. He’d never actually seen someone happy to be setting up a hit on a family for five hundred bucks in twenty-dollar bills.
“Make a left up ahead,” Joe said. “The church is there on your right.”
CHAPTER 80
MARY CATHERINE’S BEDROOM WAS on the third floor, in the quaint, rickety Victorian farmhouse’s converted attic. It was little bigger than a closet, but its dormer window, with its clear, unbroken view of the flat grasslands and the grand Sierra Nevada beyond, actually made it her favorite spot in the entire house.
A bright moon was hanging just above the awe-inspiring peaks when Mary Catherine suddenly came awake a little after one a.m. She flipped her pillow over and lay there staring out the window, listening intently, wondering what had woken her.
After another minute, she decided that it was nothing, probably just the two glasses of the wine that Leo had brought over for dinner. She hardly drank at all these days, but Leo had seemed concerned about whether the wine he’d brought matched up properly with the roast chicken she’d served. Indulging in a couple of glasses of pinot grigio seemed the least she could do to assuage his fears.
Dinner with Leo is swiftly becoming part of the regular routine now, isn’t it? she thought, smiling. Even the boys who had given her so much trouble had decided to stop the silent treatment when Leo quietly started talking baseball with them. Leo had that effect on people. There was something still inside him, an openness, a … gentleness. You couldn’t help but like him.
She didn’t know how Leo would fit into the picture once Mike came back, but she’d decided to cross that bridge when she came to it. She wasn’t one for making people jealous, but she was actually looking forward to Mike’s reaction. At least a little. It would be quite interesting to see how much Mike liked watching another man pay her some attention for a change.
She was looking out at the dark land, the mountains glowing in the starlight, and groggily thinking about Leo and Mike when she thought she heard something downstairs. Then she heard
it again. A soft thumping, followed by the creak of weight on wood.
How now, brown cow? she thought, frowning, as she put her bare feet to the rough floorboards and found her slippers. Out her door and down the stairs, she stopped and looked over the banister of the second-floor landing. A suspicious, flickering glow of blue light was coming from what seemed to be the main level’s family room.
She padded down the stairs and quietly around the corner of the kitchen. Just as she suspected, here they were. The things that go bump in the night, in the living flesh.
In the family room, with their backs to her, Eddie and Ricky were splayed out on the couch, thumbs and fingers clicking madly as they played the NBA Street Homecourt PlayStation game that Leo had brought them that evening.
“And one! Woop, woop! That’s right. I’m good,” Eddie said, raising his controller over his head as he did a little dance. “I’m gonna dunk on you like that all day long.”
“Don’t you mean all night long, you little sneak thieves?” Mary Catherine said, and watched the kids jump.
Eddie dropped his controller and lay facedown in front of the TV, pretending to sleep, as Ricky turned around, smiling bravely.
“Mary Catherine. Hi. Um, you want to play winner?” he tried.
“Don’t get cheeky with me. It’s almost two in the God-loving morning. Heads on your pillows this instant, or I’ll dunk the both of you in your rooms for a week. I’ve half a mind to talk to Mr. Cody and get you two night owls some milking work tomorrow. Maybe a week of watching the world go by from the underside of a cow will help you learn the meaning of a good night’s sleep.”
“Cow punishment? No! You can’t! The horror!” Eddie yelled, jumping up and racing his brother out of the room, heading for the stairs.
She’d turned off the set and was going back through the kitchen when she saw the full coffeepot. Leo, on duty now out on the porch, must have just made himself some. She primped in the mirror of the powder room and put her barn jacket over her pj’s before she poured a cup.